Chris Ault and the pistol offense

New Orleans — Colin Kaepernick doesn’t like when people call his college offense – the pistol – that the 49ers now use at times “gimmicky.”

“It’s effective” he said.

Well, back when former Nevada head coach Chris Ault was conceiving it in 2005, he was afraid people were going to call it “crazy.” Which is why he didn’t tell people what he was doing until he was done.

Ault wanted to combine the spread passing game that you get from the shotgun with the power running game. The running back lines up behind the quarterback, so he is moving toward the line of scrimmage, and the quarterback is only 4 yards behind the center as opposed to 6.

Voila, a pistol.

“And the quarterback is the bullet,” Ault said.

And Kaepernick was the silver bullet, as when he arrived in Reno in 2007, Ault was still fine-tuning his offense and saw with the lanky speedster a chance to improve it. Ault put in zone-read plays in which Kaepernick would put the ball in his running back’s stomach, while reading the defense and then decide whether to hand it off or pull it back and run it himself outside.

Other colleges copied Nevada, and this year, the Redskins, Panthers and 49ers used it, with young quarterbacks Robert Griffin III, Cam Newton and Kaepernick making defenses look bad. Even the Steelers started to implement it.

“To see it in the NFL is really exciting,” said Ault, who recently retired. He got into New Orleans on Thursday night for Super Bowl XLVII. “There are so many things you can do with it.”

Kaepernick wasn’t a can’t-miss pistol candidate when Ault first saw him. Kaepernick ran the Wing-T in high school, was “just an OK athlete” and threw with a sidearm pitching motion.

“I told myself, his freshman year, that I could always move him to free safety or wide receiver,” Ault said. “He was built like a fork and was not the special athlete you see today.”

But when Nevada’s starting quarterback was hurt in 2007, Ault called on the redshirt freshman and he responded. The Wolf Pack had 702 yards of offense in Kaepernick’s first game, and he quickly took to the offense.

“You need to be able to run and you need to be able to read the defense,” Kaepernick said. “And those were things I did well.”

Kaepernick is not surprised the read-option and pistol are working for the 49ers.

“I thought it would work to some extent,” he said. “I didn’t think it was something you could run every play. There are too many good athletes on defense at this level. Not so much the speed, just the fact that everybody is good on defense. There are not really too many people you can just pick on in the NFL like there is in college.”

Kaepernick ran for 181 yards against the Packers in the first playoff win three weeks ago. The Falcons then took away the outside run in the next game and still couldn’t stop the 49ers.

“That’s where the pistol comes in,” Ault said. “Kaep didn’t run the ball and instead read the defense and handed the ball off. (Frank) Gore scored twice on read-type plays … and there’s also this: They can do play-action off those plays as well.”

The Falcons couldn’t see Gore before the ball was snapped, as he was behind Kaepernick.

“With the running back behind the quarterback,” Ault said, “the linebackers do not have a clear view of what he’s doing. You can run downhill power games, counters and gaps from the pistol.”

“Colin obviously has some background in it and he is a unique and rare athlete,” Roman said. “Anytime you have a rare athlete, you are going to want to have that athlete impact the game any way that you can.

“The difference between us and Carolina, for example, is we are only going to do it so much. It is an adjunct to what we normally do. It is not the crux of what we do.”

The 49ers definitely can use it more or less when they see how a team reacts to it. Green Bay looked lost so San Francisco used the pistol formation on 45 percent of its plays in that win.

“I think that it’s been successful for us because of the players that we have executing it,” 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh said. “I think they’re extremely good at it. Also from a schematic standpoint, I think Greg Roman has done a job that is revolutionary in football.

“I think the way he’s mixed the trap, the power, the wham plays into the pistol offense and into the conventional offense has been revolutionary in many ways.”